skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I believe the author is not wrong in his argument that information theory is a bound on machine intellignce, I think the problem with using information theoretic bounds is that it is not a tight bound. In other words, I don't think information theory is currently the limiting factor.

The author argues that any AI will consist of two parts, the machine learning program L and the training set T, which combine to form the "intelligent" program M. And thus by information theory, k(L) + k(T) >= k(M) [where k is the kolmogorov complexity]. Thus M is bounded by the information in L and also bounded by T. The author argues that since these both depend on humans supplying them, we are limited by the human factor.

But how much information does one really need for AI? Well, how much information is necessary for human intelligence? Assuming that L is our genome (ignoring epigenetics), and T is our life experiences. The amount of data in our genome is on the order of around 3gb. I would argue that's certainly within the realm of feasibility for programmer's output. How about the training set T? That's harder to say; does it include video, audio, touch, etc? How many years until a human is considered intelligent (by AI standards)? I think it's safe to say that a 10 year old blind human could pass a Turing test. So if we ignore tactile and olfactory feedback, we basically just need 10 years of compressed audio as the training set. Generously encoding the audio at 128kbps 24/7 for 10 years = 4.7 terabytes. Which is easily within the realm of current machine learning. We have far more information than that (and much more densely encoded as text), but still aren't close to True AI.

I think the problem is not that we don't have enough Information, I think it's that we have not yet searched enough of the problem space. And that's where more hardware can help us.
Try the same when taking shower, or brushing teeth, or anything else that we do mundanely on daily basis. It is indeed easier said than done but the point is that life provides several opportunities to stay-in-present but the mind has been trained for ages to wander in past or future.
I love GitHub, the quality of their product, and what they've done for the open source community. But I've always thought a decentralized version control system deserves some kind of decentralized social network. Wouldn't it be cool to see an implementation of GitHub (following, pull requests, issues, all the rest) on top of, say, tent.io?
>women had typing classes in school

I'm wondering when this changed to include all kids. I remember doing Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing on my home computer at around 6, then again at school in grade 2. This would have been in the early 90s, and every kid at my school took typing classes once a week. By grade 3 or 4 they were teaching us Basic on the Apple IIe. Around that time as well, school assignments had to be typed and printed off for submission. Did other people have the same experience, with computers being a part of your official early education?
When I was in college at the University of Pittsburgh, I took a fascinating class called "Mysticism: East and East" that compared the contemplative traditions of Yoga and Orthodox Christian hesychast prayer. As a practicing Buddhist at the time, it was an eye-opening class.

I don't really know how to present a concise summary of the class, but I did find this paper by my teacher which sets forth an overview: http://www.doiserbia.nb.rs/ft.aspx?id=0350-08610802171B

Now of course Orthodox hesychasm is about communion with a person, whereas eastern meditation is typically not (Pure Land schools of Buddhism are more in line with Judeo-Christian concepts of prayer, though). But I think that there is some common ground for dialogue, and perhaps this paper may be of interest to you or others who enjoyed the original article and are interested in other practices.
Your premise is false. Law schools and law firms actively marketed themselves to women and actively tried to enroll or hire a certain number of women. Tech companies have never taken such measures. Heck, only the biggest companies een pay lip service to the idea of trying to recruit more women.
It can get frustrating when you really try and yet constantly fail to maintain focus. It helps to remember that the purpose of the exercise is not to succeed in maintaining a laser-like focus, but instead to practice noticing your failures. That is how you level up your self-awareness into a skill that carries over into activities beyond dishwashing.
I'm seeing quite an interest here for the principles and techniques of meditation. Here's a link for some talks given by a wonderful teacher, on mindfulness/meditation and other topics.

http://www.audiodharma.org/
#DisruptDatIndustry
Depends how much sugar you put into them.
Anti-Procrastination Agreement
Why is this better than androidbootstrap.com ?
> Meditation is the focused practice of resisting distraction.

Are we defining it this way? Because this does not jive with my experience of meditation, focusing, or resisting distraction.

> Have you ever tried sitting still for 15-30 minutes, doing nothing but breathing?

Yes. As a matter of fact, meditation was part of a martial arts practice I participated in for 2 years. In all that time I tried very hard to do this, but never found much value in it. Eventually I settled on quietly and methodically reflecting on the day, which is something that seemed to have a lot more value than chasing a vague notion of emptiness.

And honestly I'm not convinced this is _any different_ from the "benefits" of meditation.
Niklaus Wirth on Teaching Computer Science
Of course. My primary meditation activity tends to be playing my guitar. I was just reminded of my explanation about gaming.

To be "present" 24/7 is a very difficult achievement, but it's a great goal to keep in mind.

Edit: grammar
Also, FYI, your SSL cert on the homepage is throwing a full screen warning for me in Chrome on Mac OSX.
The title could be better. What he's describing with the term "dark social" is not the "Web", it's the internet. That's a distinction that is important to understand. There is much you can do over the internet that is difficult to do over the "web". Moreover, the "web" is still quite centralized in the sense that there are a disproportionate number of servers to clients. It has been called the "calf-cow" model. Some are calling for an end to that.
Your software is really cool. Just wondering why you haven't completed your website yet. The "how it works" just takes you to a google doc. Anyway, best of luck. If you want to venture to Lake Tahoe, I'd be happy to grab a beer.
Would be cool if you could collaborate and build Minecraft like worlds together (and then print them out). I could see this being like next gen Lego when you start being able to package and redistribute your scripts.

Or maybe new kinds of board games where you input your last game's end state and the scripts print out the pieces for the next round. Evolving game board a bit like in Risk Legacy.
Yes, indeed. But when you add the phenomena of activity humans love to do and excel in, you can see that those transcendent moment occur when the mind is in here-now.

If you are into watching movies and when you watch an exceptionally good movie, you are most likely staying in present in that moment where the mind is not there to distract. It could be a great scene or it could be the whole movie, the experience one gets out of watching good movie, is as same as the experience one gets out of being-in-present. But obviously the moment passes leaving the taste in your mouth, but the point is ... that one can find and cultivate those moments further in life in other situations.
I'd like to actually see some evidence that Meditation helps people sustain that state of mind. Because I hear people trot it out a lot but I've never seen it backed up by hard data.

I think meditation may have benefits, but the idea that it helps you "build up willpower" has always been one I thought we could actually measure, and yet I've never seen a good study of it.
> Fluency with permissions is fundamental knowledge for a competent unix operator.

This has precisely nothing to do with whether ls colors its output or not.

> A clear advantages to BSD is that tooling man pages are produced by a single team.

They're still too short to really introduce any tool complex enough to need documentation.

> In addition, tools tend to do one and only one thing, which promotes use of pipes and scripts rather than obscure tool features.

BSD has find. I know it does.
Happens to me all the time. I am working on a piece of code in the afternoon, and can't move forward or looking to identify a bug or optimizing some algorithm - wasting hours. After a meditation session I walk back to the computer screen, take a seat, and my hand clicks around the tabs, my fingers scroll around, my eye catches one obscure line of code which is EXACTLY where the problem sits. I had this happen so many times, it's a given by now. The article (and I am sure all who do meditate) shares the same kind of experience.
Oh, I thought you meant you tried to implement something like this and had trouble. LOL. Well, thanks.
I make any non critical signup with mailinator.com, they even have alternate domain names for signup forms that check for mailinator emails.

I use my real email only on services that I trust that will not spam or sell it.
Great feedback Sumaso, I'll update the post and reply again when it's done! Thanks.
Improve node.js applications with MariaDB non-blocking client API
[Poll HN] Who do you think won the VP Debate?
If you took all the male foreveraloners and replaced them with normal people and women, would more women be attracted to the field? If so, why not do that?

It's one thing to say that women don't select into a profession because they don't have the aptitude to do it. I think the number of women who score 700+ on the Math SAT proves that at least a lot more women have the aptitude for tech than to into it. If its not aptitude, then it must be culture, and why should the male foreveraloners get to dictate the culture of the field? Because they were there first?
A real spammer will take any link, it doesn't matter if the link won't be considered as some form of endorsement by search engines due to the use of the rel=nofollow attribute. A spammer will happily post a million links, there will be some poor souls out there and click on some of them. Quantity over quality has always been one characteristic trait of spam.

Spam and link spam were already there before Google existed and the PageRank was invented. The index of the AltaVista search engine was huge and full of spam.

When the nofollow value for the rel attribute was introduced there were many claims that this would reduce the amount of link and comment spam. Critical remarks came often from people who were offering link building and SEO as a service.
"during meditation, you practice resisting urges."

Saying this does not make it true thought. Is that actually what people do during meditation? The only experience I have with meditation is sitting in seiza position after 2 hours of Ki Aikido, slowly feeling my muscles cramp, listening to someone hit a drum periodically, and not feeling anything good at all.

Eventually I just learned to devote that time to reviewing things I had learned that day. I found this self-reflective practice far more refreshing and pleasant than any search for metaphorical emptiness.
I've had several services that forced me to make a phone call to cancel. World of Warcraft and Audible specifically (they don't always make you call, but after you've cancelled/re-subscribed several times you seem to get flagged).
as per http://paulbohm.com/pdf/10.1.1.76.5543.pdf and http://paulbohm.com/pdf/general_limitations.pdf learning by example requires many more examples than the kolmogorov complexity of the target concept.

T then is not just the life experience of one human - to learn from observation by example, to reconstruct a human, you'd need to observe the life experiences of trillions and trillions of humans to gain sufficient information about humans to narrow down the possible implementations that match human behavior not just mechanically given the same input, but also given new previously untested input.

at 3gb encoded as dna the search space already is huge, but that ignores that the genome alone doesn't contain the information needed to read it. (e.g. you need a living thing to use the DNA, for it to make sense)
Richard MacManus leaves ReadWriteWeb
Hm. I'd be interested in helping with this if anyone else would want to brainstorm. Having it be formalized is important as most companies aren't that interested in having random people wander in every day - even with appointments.
Famo.us' magical user interface for the web
How many people sign in to facebook on an average day, how many of those people interact with facebook and how many of those click on an ad?
I completely agree with the point.

I've been playing guitar (blues improv) long before I started meditating, and I really noticed the similarities in the state of mind it put you in.

I've been an insomniac for a long time and meditating did help me a lot. Be it playing guitar, sitting or doing yoga.
Is that for https://zenboxapp.com or https://www.zenboxapp.com?
Does the Willpower Instinct contain any sort of actual empirical analysis of the subject? Or is it just someone with a PhD saying something?

Because medical professionals can believe in magic and bullshit just as easily as anyone else.
This is an awesome tool. How did I not know about it?!
Traditional Real Estate Professionals Fight Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com
The idea behind meditation is not that difficult to understand. However, it is watered down quite a bit, especially if you learn it in a New Age environment. If you go back to the old schools of meditation, the techniques are very clear and straight forward and can be applied in daily life. It is really helpful though to know some meditation principles:

http://theravadin.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/surfing-on-the-wa...

http://theravadin.wordpress.com/2010/11/03/anussati-sinking-...
Sounds like similar benefits to exercising.
Right here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4644687
I realize that I already replied to this once, but I wanted to make another response not directly related to my other one, and it seemed too lengthly to add as an edit. I apologize if this is frowned upon at HN.

In Soto Zen Buddhism, the point isn't necessarily to "quiet the mind," because that implies that the running rivers of thoughts somehow dry up and give rise to a silent stillness. This may be the goal of some forms of meditation, but it is not the interpretation of Zen.

Dogen Zenji preferred to use the term shikantaza, which means something like "nothing but to hit sit," or less literally, "just sitting." The understanding is that rejecting thoughts is the other side of the coin of embracing thoughts: both are rooted in attachment to the thought, identification of the thought with the illusion of self or ego.

The "purpose" of shikantaza, also known as zazen (sitting meditation), is to neither accept nor reject thoughts. Thus the mind isn't necessarily becoming "quiet," but rather the process of self-aggrandizement is discontinued.

It might seem like I'm nitpicking over your word choice, but Zen in particular is a school that is very focused on how language itself is rooted in the concept of "I" and our ego. You can contrast shikantaza to other forms of meditation that utilize a particular focus, such as an image, which is something that Zen would not generally endorse (for you would simply be displacing grasping at one thing with another thing).

Shikantaza is tied to "thusness," or being fully in the moment, which webwanderings above explains quite well.
Want to learn How to start Blogging as A Pro - To Start Blogging Manifesto
I don't see how "not adequately replicating mouth conditions" leads to "would not be useful to determine effect on enamel".

Yes, there will be significant differences between drinking Coke and soaking a tooth in Coke overnight. But that doesn't mean it won't provide a useful basis for comparison! Possibly even more useful than the arbitrary formula the author and dentist in the article came up with.
The "Trash-80" (TRS-80 Model I) was not a laptop, but the Radio Shack Model 100 most certainly qualified. It was a brick -- no clamshell -- with a full-travel QWERTY keyboard on the bottom and a rinky-dink nonbacklit calculator display on top. It came with BASIC and some other rudimentary applications. The OS was menu-driven, and was the last significant piece of software that Bill Gates personally contributed to.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100

Writers loved these things because they lasted for ages on a set of AA cells.
Same here. As far as I was able to discern with some research, it has to do with the rendering engine that Chrome uses - I think GDI+ instead of DirectDraw, or perhaps vice-versa, whereas Firefox and IE use the better one, and IIRC Safari has its own.

EDIT: This page has more info, but I'm not sure if it's up-to-date: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/04/24/a-closer-look-at-...
> [random butt statue]

The story is a few thousand years old http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_Callipyge#Interpretations The "objectification" might be considered sexist now, but I doubt the original story meant to belittle the women in any way.
It's possible that not all of the co-workers he showed were engineers.
I'm really curious if github's culture is the cause of their success or a result of it. I'm doubly curious if their bootstrapping was critical to this. My suspicion is that when outside investment arrives, the clock starts ticking, the pressure mounts on the founders, and this may result in a greater motivation to "manage" people's time, for fear of "wasting" time.
Here is what I don't get about your argument. You're using one theory of social conditioning to explain why women stay away from CS (the social status of the field), while implicitly rejecting the more obvious bit of social conditioning: the perception that engineering is for socially maladjusted men.

And neither provides a principled reason to maintain the status quo. Why should the socially maladjusted men already in engineering (as you call them) get to define the culture of the field?

What if tech companies tried to actively change the culture of the field. What if, say for 15 years, tech companies put a thumb on the scale by actively trying to recruit say 25% women. You'd definitely have to take slightly less qualified candidates in order to meet the quota, but it would be transient. After 15 years, there would be a critical mass of women in the field, and the perception of the field as being for socially maladjusted men would be greatly diminished. Tech companies would have enough women applicants to maintain their new ratios without putting a thumb on the scale. You can say it's "unfair" to the men who would have gotten those jobs in the interim, but is it any more "fair" for a group to keep another group out of a lucrative profession by defining a particular culture?
How Foursquare plans to monetize: no dumb banners, all specific targeting
Great comment, thanks for making it. There's nothing like having a domain expert explain the tradeoffs using specifics.

A while back I wrote a reusable class that draws a single button using three overlapping CAGradientLayers each .5 pixels larger than the next layer drawn on top of it. With this arrangement I can then specify top and bottom values for the "outer gradient", "inner gradient" and "body gradient" producing beautiful buttons that are 100% adjustable in code. Since 80% of my skills lie in the development realm vs. the design realm this class has been insanely useful for me across multiple projects.

But obviously not efficient. If I wanted to refactor my class to still have the three levels of run-time rendered gradients along with rounded corners, what would be the most efficient method?
The $2 interactive whiteboard
The www version. The non-www version doesn't load for me.
Thunderbird 16 Released. Comes With 25 GB of Free Cloud Storage
Oh man that was an awesome game. I used to stay until 11pm at night playing colleagues over the Lotus network. And then once we found out how to download wad files from some US university over FTP...

Mind you, walking out through a darkened office with lights turning on and off used to give you a few flashbacks...
Will.i.am and Simon Cowell consider X-Factor show for entrepreneurs
It depends what you want to do - as has been alluded to here, the image based approach will be the best option in terms of responsiveness. If you draw your entire button with core graphics you can then rasterize it, but the drawing process is in itself computationally more expensive than rendering out the image.
Taken from their About page: "ActiveRain is not trying to change the real estate business model, unlike other technology companies. Rather, ActiveRain augments the existing one."
Freshly squeezed oranges are not what most people consume when they consume juice. A sterilized, overly processed concoction of fructose and acid, which, yes, originated in fruit, is.
That does not credit Bill Gosper.

http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~jowen/hashlife.html
Right, when you don't control for anything, you see a gap. The gap dissappears when you actually control for those factors. How does that contradict what I said?

According to the evidence cited in the Wikipedia link, the consensus of MOST researchers is that, even after accounting for every factor that we can account for, there remains a persistent male/female gap.

The existence of this gap may not be the result of sexism. For instance read http://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/hvv2m/i_wor... where equal treatment of men and women who are doing equal jobs results in VERY different compensation for women. In the same light http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/career/negotiating-a-higher... shows that the anecdote is supported in wider ranging statistics.
This reminds me of how a friend described the role of product manager: "a person with huge responsibility but no power." That doesn't have to be a bad thing. The best product managers know how to listen, give and receive feedback, persuade and build consensus around features, deadlines, marketing strategy etc even though they don't have the power to say "just do what I said."
Have there been any studies on whether drinking with a straw is better than drinking from a cup/bottle?
Designing Better Interactions
When letting Google or Yahoo store the email in the cloud one assumes that _they_ keep a backup - indeed that there are several copies of the messages stored - so this seems weird.
Code Gems for Android Developers
Article is not wrong about this. It is hard to measure what meditation is doing on a subjective level, which is very specific and easy to talk about amongst people who have spent even an hour meditating.

The key here, which for you might be a leap of faith, is that when one tries to simply focus on their breath (or the dishes), completely without our permission thoughts continue to pop into our head. The 'natural' thing to do is follow these thoughts; and there is a will of resistance to go back to your breath again and again. It is hard to do, and get easier with practice.

Anyone who has spent say, >3 hours of their life meditating will recognize it as a fact that meditation strengthens your will.
Link HTML5 Audio Tag To Canvas Vilualisation
Except for the huge differences in features, userbase and number of relevant projects which have moved primarily to using github.
Exactly. This is a ploy to spend money building our offensive weapons. Pork for a campaign contributor, sharp sticks for the intelligence agencies.
Transistor was a byproduct. Bell labs was a place where great/smart people and their ideas and thoughts were simmering for ages. Transistor from what I read almost didn't happen, but by accident it did.

Isn't pivot is a synthetic replacement for the essence of 'happy' accident?